TFCraft Dedicated & VPS Hosting?

[MrWarhawk 6]

Hey guys,

I was curious if anyone here knew of a GOOD, CHEAP and RELIABLE host that supports full modding, or TFCraft with other mods. I'm curious to know what you guys suggest, the server max's about 15-20 players. And I just need something to really be stable. My server isn't doing to hot, so I need something more reliable and stable.

Thanks

[Jasnatdic 85]

I don't know any service to recommend, but i always recommend dedicated for minecraft servers. Minecraft/java handles resources way to horribly to be trying to share a machine with multiple servers. But, dedicates are going to cost you much more.

You might even find it more advantageous to just save and upgrade parts on your personal server machine. All you need is motherboard cpu memory 50 gig hard drive or less depending on the os you run, and the cheapest video card you can find that is non integrated.

As far as stability, my server is up all the time, no crashes, no downtime. it can stay running stable for months on end without a reboot. You would be VERY hard pressed to find a provider that can give you 100% up time for a week let alone months. The only thing that will stop my up time is the power going out, but so far that hasn't happened. Something i recommend for stability is getting 16g of ram or more, 16g only costs like 30 bucks more than 8g, and then running the server instance on a RAM drive; 2-4 gigs is more than big enough. Will give you way faster world load write speeds, and more stability in my experience. You just need to have a backup to disk drive every hour or so as a just in case your machine drops. Most ram drive software has built in backup and restore functions.

[MrWarhawk 6]

I have a dedicated server. Its running a 1055t, 12gigs ram, its got 5tb hdd not that space matters, its got a great mobo for its processor, and its using integrated graphics.. i have two GPUs I can use though. But I'm not sure if graphics are slowing it down. I use to run tekkit with 20-25 players and NO LAG. Like it was great. but right now with TFCraft its dying with 6 players online and a view distance of 7. I usually had the view distance at 10 or 11 depending on the day. So I have no idea what the hell is causing my problems..

[Jasnatdic 85]

Turn the integrated graphics to as low as they go, or even off and get a cheepo card that will go in. Try getting some ramdisk software and set it to like 1.5 or 2 gigs and run the server instance on that and see if it helps. Would take a MASSIVE world to break a gig.

Id be willing to bet its read write slowness on the hard disk, or maybe fragmentation. Both issues will be fixed by instanceing on a ramdisk. Another strong possibility is network bandwidth. Each client uses a constant 100-400 megabits because of the halfwhitted way that minecraft does chunks, ie no chunk cacheing. Basically every single time you load a chunk moveing around you download it from the server. Doesn't matter if its new, or if you have been there or in load range of it a thousand times. If it unloads and then you reload it you have to download. This is compounded by the fact that in TFC sea level is at 140(I think) instead of 64 like vanilla so it is basically like 2 to 3 times the data.

If your internet is like 12 meg you will never host 25 people on TFC unless someone comes out with an effective and compatible chunk cache solution for minecraft. Really you need like a 50 up down line to host more than a few friends. The up bandwidth being the important number for a mc server.

[MrWarhawk 6]

I don't believe its the bandwidth, though I'm going to try this ram-disk. I do have ramdisks installed though I heard they were REALLY unstable. And If it ends up being bandwidth, I'll figure it out. But I use to host 20 players bro, and with a view distance of 10, like no one EVER complained about lag, until people started going stupid with chunk loaders.

[Chezzik 22]

I'm pretty sure that version 49 and 50 has some big instability problems. If you look over at the public server forum, a lot of the servers there have found that the server begins to lag terribly after being up for more than about 2 hours.

Version 48 (on 1.2.5) seemed a lot more stable. If your players didn't mind too much, I guess you could maybe try version 48 for a little bit to determine if the problems you have are based on the changes in 49.

One of the theories is that players are travelling a lot more now in v49 because of the distance to the pole and to the equator, and this extra travelling means a lot of chunk generation. I know at least one server (Terra RPPVP) was attempting to use MLG to generate a large playing area first.

[MrWarhawk 6]

Well how can I use MLG with a modded server, I don't mind trying that. At the moment using the RAMDISK has helped quite a bit. I'm not sure how actual server restarts and loading/saving is going to work yet. But I'm seeing a lot less lagg. I just think adding MLG and generating for a few hours at a time, when no ones on the server wouldn't be too bad.

[GCountach 39]

Just my 2 cents here, but can't you use MCEdit to pregen worlds?

Just make a new folder in "ServerJarStorage" (if you go to MCEdit's options and change install mode to "portable", it'll be in the same folder as the exe). Inside there, make a new folder and name it whatever you want ("v132 TFCraft 50c" seems like a really good choice). Inside that folder, placed your modded minecaft_server.jar. Now, open MCEdit, choose "create new world", pick your chunk size, Choose minecraft server as the generator, and under server version, choose the name of the the folder you placed your modded server jar in. Wala?